Artist Profile: Hataałii
Hataałii: 21-year-old singer-songwriter, conjurer of dread and solace, of empty desert scapes, of loneliness and solitude and the difference that remains.
His ballads of longing and desperate misery successfully encapsulate the polarities which have been in development since his youth in Window Rock, Arizona (Tségháhoodzání): the functional capital of the Navajo Nation. With guitars his father purchased from a nearby flea market, Hataałii taught himself to play bass in Middle School, beginning with “My Girl” by The Temptations.
Multiple label releases, a stint at UNM, and a few hundred songs (and GarageBand files) later, Hataałii has now found himself using those same guitars in the recording of his new project, “Waiting for a Sign”. Considering the change which has blown through his young career, this continuity is both admirably tangible and deftly symbolic. Indeed, on his newest project, Hataałii has found new perspectives through which to expound his imagined psyches while maintaining a definite sense of explicated self and terrestrial presence.
In his words, his music has allowed him to keep a personal “log of time”, one which recalls forgotten moments from the past and scraps of subconscious mutterings. However, despite the devoutly personal aspects of his music, he is not opposed to its public recognition.
As he puts it, “Yeah, if other people like it, then that's cool too.”
Hataałii has effectively guaranteed, from sheer quality, that people will like his output.
Even in his early days, recording a daily song in his boarding school dorm room, he displayed a unique sense of what lends the ear to DIY music: the unfiltered grooves and lyrical conceptualizations of the songwriter. As he continued to develop his sound, eventually signing with Dangerbird Records, these aspects of his music only expanded as they received more polishing. His eccentric ability to evoke simultaneously nebulous and stark characters, such as on the track “Council Delegate’s Wife”, render him, in his words, a “cartographer of the imagination”.
“It's a spontaneous thing, but it's also a thing where I'll be walking down the street someday, and one day or any day, and I'll see somebody do something, you know, somebody I've never seen before look a certain way, have an impression on me somehow, and I'll unknowingly carry that into the studio. And that character will be that. And so, I don't know why I like to write about that, or why I do that, but it feels cool.”
A vast portion of Hataałii’s creative process lies in spontaneity: the ability to sit down with an open D.A.W. until slowly, but surely, something is brought into existence. For him, the semi-ironic and poetically-jumbled lyrics come last; they are preceded by noodlings and licks which eventually find their way into cohesive instrumentals. This is something that has not changed much since his earliest recordings. Yet, Hataałii has sensed a paradox in his artistic growth and maturation: the slow death of the eagerness of youthful exuberance and carelessness.
“I feel like as I get older I lose a certain sense of creativity, but that's also feeding this sense of despair in me that also drives me to make good songs,” he said, “Back then, I didn't really have anything to care about, and I was very creative. I was very young… whereas now I feel like it's almost a game where time is just running out and I just kind of make as much cool shit as I can.”
The contradictions of Hataałii’s youth and the cosmic breadth of his music manifest themselves in almost every track on “Waiting For a Sign”. With the gradual integration of the DIY and garage sensibilities of his adolescence and the vast celestial landscapes of his adulthood, it will be exciting to see the bounds to which Hataałii expands his psychological map in the coming years.
Listen to Hataałii’s new project here.